Creeper Crawl

We hung out in dark rooms with tense teenagers. They screamed.

Even the air inside Butteville Manor is creepy. The
160-year-old mansion stinks of age, decay and drywall mud—a dank
cocktail that clings to your hoodie long after you’ve made it past the
gauntlet of spooks lurking inside.

It’s hard to imagine
any better setting for the haunted houses that spring up this time of
year than this 4,000-square-foot farmhouse outside the town of Donald,
Ore., pop. 979. Neighborhood kids have long spun lore around it, says
owner Christie Kelly.

“I had one girl come
up and ask me to take photos of it for ‘a school project,’” she says.
“She said her friends really wanted to see inside what they called ‘the
creepy old house.’”

The big manor on the
edge of town was built by one of Oregon’s original homesteaders and sits
on land deeded to hop farmer G.A. Cone through the Donation Land Claim
Act of 1850. Kelly’s family has owned it for a century, though no one
has lived in it for 20 years, after her grandparents gave up trying to
care for it and moved into a manufactured home next door.

So Kelly—who is
renovating the house with the hope of one day living in it—decided to
make it into a Halloween attraction. She’d learned the business while
managing a party store in the center of the state, though the show she’s
crafted here is quite different. “A lot of the larger haunts are all
the same...all animatronic,” she says. “With this house I wanted to use
actors, and I think using actors is more effective.”

Butteville
Manor, which has a parking lot large enough for only a few cars and is
staffed by a disproportionate number of elementary-aged children made up
in bloodstained hospital gowns, may leave you disquieted on the
40-minute drive back to Portland. I was impressed from the moment
Kelly’s cousin, playing a deranged nurse, stained my hand with a glowing
streak of fluid from a chalice, whispering a warning: “Don’t let the
doctor see the mark.”

What happens if the doctor, who wanders the halls calling for you, sees the green glow?

You’ll have to find out for yourself—or test your nerve at one of the other area haunts we’ve reviewed here. MARTIN CIZMAR.

SCREAM PORTLAND

A few inches off I-5, Scream Portland sits in a desolate
field next to Portland International Raceway. An unfocused jumble of
canvas-roofed plywood shacks, attractions include a haunted gold mine
crawling with animatronic tarantulas and a “Twisted Circus” that’s a
mess of red-and-white-striped curtains, strobe lights and house music,
where a clown asked if I wanted to have a dance party and a bearded
woman proposed marriage. A soggy day drew a subdued crowd: most under
30, plenty of hand-holding couples, mobs of high-school kids poorly
equipped for the rain. People dashed from haunt to haunt, their shrieks
due more to the chilly downpour than to the actors paid to scare them. Read the full review. REBECCA JACOBSON.

There’s some depressing real-life horror
associated with this haunt on a country road outside the burg of Donald:
Part of the proceeds are going to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in
memory of Kacy Sue Lunsford Duda, daughter of Michael Duda, who runs the
haunt with owner Christie Kelly. Kacy Sue, 3, was killed by her
mother’s boyfriend, Benjamin George, an ex-Marine, now serving a life
sentence for performing “ultimate wrestling” moves on the child as he
babysat her in 2010, collapsing her lungs, lacerating her liver and
causing massive brain swelling. Knowing this, the haunt’s icy-eyed child
actors are even more chilling. Read the full review. MARTIN CIZMAR.

This four-acre corn “maize” (get it?) winds along a path
lit only by tiki torches and the occasional strobe light. In order to
get from one end to the other, visitors must pass through several
disorienting “farmhouses” and survive encounters with disfigured
hillbillies, grotesque demonoids and, worst of all, canoodling
teenagers. (Pro tip for oldsters: Go on the night of a big high-school
football game.) My biggest scare came from well-disguised Swamp Things
rising from the muck in a fetid bog. There’s very little blood spilled
at this family-oriented affair; most of the scares are telegraphed to
visitors in advance, and the maze, at least this year, isn’t all that
hard to find your way out of. But if you’re going to be pumpkin shopping
on Sauvie Island, this haunt makes for a nice stroll before you return
to town. Read the full review. MATTHEW SINGER.

Portland’s most-hyped Halloween
attraction is hidden with little fanfare in the concrete catacombs below
Memorial Coliseum. Here, groups of teenagers flirt near a sad-looking
kiosk selling sad-looking junk food. But true to its reputation,
FrightTown offers a sophisticated setup inside each haunt, with
immersive sets, a small army of actors, high-quality animatronics,
professional makeup jobs, and almost certainly a far more detailed
backstory to every scene than the audience will ever know or care about.
“The Contagion,” this year’s new haunt, offers a post-apocalyptic Walking Dead
experience, which, while not exceptionally scary, is plenty gross, as
wild-eyed actors cough and retch all over you. On a quiet Wednesday
night, you can do all three haunts in under a half-hour, but I’m told
the lines grow as All Hallow’s Eve draws nigh. Read the full review. RUTH BROWN.

This three-part haunt is hosted at a family-owned farm on a
winding country road outside the two-block town of Hubbard. The “manor”
is an ignoble storage barn with other scares set up in the woods around
it. In the best of the bunch, the star of the story is a parricidal
youngster, here played by a gothy teenage girl decked out in ghostly
white makeup and a frilly dress. There’s also a wooded haunt next to the
barn. It’s under attack by zombies who cannot walk through metal
fencing, though they do like to shake that fencing and breathe loudly.
(Don’t worry, these zombies do not yell and do not have chainsaws.) The
third attraction, “The Dark” is “phobia-based,” but the only phobia
really indulged is the fear of clowns, who here are a little less scary
than your average Juggalos at a suburban MAX stop. Read the full review. MARTIN CIZMAR.

Flashing lights, hydraulic platforms and a nonstop chorus
of high-pitched screams are all packed inside a building in a random
Beaverton strip mall—it’s the warehouse rave of haunted houses. The
official backstory claims it was a covert military research facility
overrun by a virus that mutated the human scientists and unleashed alien
lab rats. The result is something like a Skrillex show. The 13th Door
is “rated” PG-13, so there are operating rooms and laboratories smeared
with blood and body parts and alien fetuses and decimated carcasses and
actors with oozing sores and open wounds—though there’s often so much
going on that a lot of these details are easily missed. While the amount
of work put into the 13th Door is admirable, there is just too damn
much going on to conjure many legitimate scares. I spent most of my 30
minutes in the building disoriented, trying to distinguish between an
exit and the entrance to the next room. If a traditional haunted house
is the original Friday the 13th, the 13th Door is Jason X: Maybe it cost more to make, but is it really any better? Read the full review. MATTHEW SINGER.

Fear Asylum isn’t made for children. Your average
8-year-old would be red-faced and tear-streaked halfway through, telling
his mom he wants to leave. It wouldn’t be easy to do so: Fear Asylum is
a massive and disorienting maze, stretching across 18 “rooms” in a
two-story Elks Lodge that’s dressed up to look like a Kingdom-style
hospital of the damned and ruined. Mental-asylum inmates roam the halls
at will while victims of mad experiments beg to be set free. “Where are
you going?” a woman yells from behind cell bars. “How can you just
leave me here? Why do you keep walking?” By the end, my companion at the
lodge was cleaving tightly and pushing at my back, trying to get me to
move faster. It is a place relentless in its desire to tip one’s
equilibrium, with an arsenal of tactics broad and deep. Trust
Milwaukie—my own somewhat bedraggled hometown—to set me ill at ease. Read the full review. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

Halloween HuntBecause Portland never stops scavenger hunting, even on
Halloween. This night-time hunt is for teams of two to six—in costume,
natch—working by torchlight. First place is $500. 7 pm Saturday, Oct. 27. $50 per team. pdxhunt.com for more info.

Halloween SpectacularCurious Comedy celebrates the season with
a special installment of the Neutrino Project, with groups of
improvisers racing to whip up a horror flick and relying on audience
participation for title suggestions, donated props and cameo
appearances. Curious Comedy, 5225 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.,
477-9477. 8 pm Friday-Saturday, Oct. 26-27; 8 pm Wednesday, Oct. 31.
$12-$15.

Phantom Halloween Costume Party with Naughty By NatureYou down with O.P.P.—Outrageous Parties
with Pretty old hip-hop acts? Then this party, taking place in a 120,000
square-foot warehouse underneath the Fremont Bridge, is the
Halloween-themed event for you, featuring a costume contest, food carts,
a professional photo booth and a headlining performance from proudly
adulterous early ‘90s pop-rap chart-toppers Naughty By Nature. 1300 N. River St., phantompdx.com. 8 pm Saturday, Oct. 27. $40 general admission, $60 VIP. 21+.